


One Small Change...

by Egon



Category: Sonic the Hedgehog (Archie Comic), Sonic the Hedgehog - All Media Types
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, M/M, Multi, Sonic the Hedgehog #182, Sonic the Hedgehog #94
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-01-22
Updated: 2016-01-22
Packaged: 2018-05-15 12:17:28
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,590
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/5785039
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Egon/pseuds/Egon
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>How wildly the scales swing out of balance when one element is modified. One small change, and it spirals out to massive, long-term consequences.</p>
            </blockquote>





	One Small Change...

**Author's Note:**

> A companion piece to 'Shadow From an Emerald Star', written by Ian Flynn as Dr. Finitevus's detailed canonical origin. I've tried to hit as many notes as possible with regard to congruency, so they can be closely compared. This was originally written April 14, 2013.

"Mmph~" 

"A-ah, Doctor, please--"

A chuckle, and then resumed kissing and nibbling, followed by an indignant squeak when hands wandered outside of safe territory. The smaller clutched and drew him in against him, before trying to press him back, gasping a breath and almost knocking Finitevus' head into the desk. A melodic trill chirped on in the background.

"Sir, w-we really need to get back to work!" He scooted himself up slightly. "Lunch is almost done-- people will find us-"

Finitevus attacked his lips and neck again, fingers searching out the device on Egon's wrist, and firmly pressing the button to turn the alarm off. "I don't care."

"I'm-- I'm going to get fired," Egon protested, but only very weakly, and they allowed themselves another few minutes of less-than-discrete kissing and groping at each other, and then some time to fix their clothing and find lost gloves.

"So... so...." There was a lovely little bruise forming on Egon's exposed shoulder, and he couldn't help returning to it, delighting in how it stood out subtly from the pink colour of his fur, or the flustered blush of heated cheeks, and abused lips. Finitevus handed him one half of his cheese sandwich, and they ate over the sink, mindful of the mess.

"No doubt you want to hear about the summons," Finitevus teased, and watched how guilty his boyfriend appeared when the magic word was so casually mentioned.

Egon nodded, cheeks full of sandwich, and they waited uncomfortably while he chewed, then swallowed, then chased it down with a soda pop. "Everyone's heard about it by now, but no one has any idea. They all came to me looking for answers -- not that I'd tell them about anything even if I knew -- but... but you know I'm curious about it all too!"

Finitevus' eyes shone with merriment and a teasing secret. "I can't really tell you. Tip top secret and all of that."

Egon pouted at him and crossed his arms. "Not even a hint, Sir? You know I'm not going to tell anyone. It's a summons from the Executive Council. That's-- I mean, it's almost unheard of in our field..." The frown was gone in place of a secretive smirk. "Whatever it is has you in pretty good spirits, though. I've never seen you that eager before..."

"Coincidentally," Finitevus started. "As we were speaking of the Byrons just earlier, our situation has much to do with Island affairs. Given it's a bit more of an international matter, it makes it more difficult for me to speak on it without engaging in an act of treason."

The intern bit his lip for a moment. "Island affairs, Byron affairs--- you said 'coincidentally' so... so you're going to use their work for something?"

He shook his head and ruffled the little fluff of fringe. "You know I can't tell you anything about it. I wish I could-- you'd be the first person to know. Suffice to say, it's very important, and if everything proceeds forward, you'll find my name in the annals of those who boldly went forth and breached the boundaries of science in pursuit of knowledge--"

"Ooh, forbidden research~!" Egon grinned excitedly, before simmering down at the rather cautious look he was given.

"Don't push it, Egon." The young one was smarter than he often gave him credit for, and if he continued on like this, he'd soon have it all wheedled out of him. "Come on, now, we'll just get some missives sent out apologising for the raincheck to my colleagues, maybe crunch some numbers for Prometheus... I was thinking Dragon Kingdom takeout for tonight, if you feel up to it."

Egon perked up. "Can we get the egg-rolls? And that dipping sauce with the mustard that made your nose feel like you were breathing fire?" 

"Why don't you make up the list," Finitevus suggested. "And when we're done with cleaning this up, we can call it in, hm?" Food was always a perfect way to distract his intern; he remembered the days of being a poor college student both fondly, and chagrinned. After a moment of consideration, he peeled his gloves off and helped Egon rinse out the Erlenmeyer flasks.

*****

"Egon." He grabbed the despondent lad by the shoulder and looped his arm around him, leading him out of the hazardous area.

"I know you can't tell me," Egon started. "I just feel left out." He blinked out at the hazy sun, and then surged forward. "That was Gala-Na! The High Councilor herself, and-- and the place was wrecked up, and then-- I know it's serious, Fini! I can't help but worry about what you're doing, and I want to help you because--"

Finitevus stroked his back slowly. "You can help. I need your help now more than ever before. I'd be honored if you wanted to help me." He hesitated, and then swung Egon around so they were facing. "It's not fair to you to leave you out when you've done so much. You're just a part of this as I am. Were it not for your tireless efforts to track down every last piece of their labs, your willingness to argue for hours over a poor connection to get access to restricted documentation on the basis of--- Egon. Egon look at me."

He planted a kiss on his cheek, and smiled into those shocked green eyes. "I don't care who sees. Look at me, Egon. I want you to know everything." He led him away from the emergency service crew to a more isolated area of the ruins, before giving him the missive, detail by detail. 

The secretary pummeled his chest with tiny fists before clutching him close and leaning his head against him. "You're going to get yourself hurt. You've never tested it before."

"We have to go through with it. I can't think of any other options that might leave the Guardian alive post-op, and I'm not going to have murder on my hands. We have precious little time, and that's why I need you. You're the only one to have read through all of my notes and understand even half of what I was saying. I need you to go through now and pick the calculations apart. Look for errors, any sort of errors, that are at odds with this new experimental data. In the mean time, I'll ready the Siphon itself." He pressed a kiss to his forehead, right between the eyes.

"But--"

"I only have time to do one." It was the stark truth. "I'd like you to help me." His hand rested firmly on his young lover's shoulder, forcing wavering green eyes to stare up into the confident purple gaze.

"I... Sir...." Egon clasped his hand with his own, lips pressing into a thin line for a brief moment. "You can count on me."

"I know I can, Egon." His eyes crinkled at the edges with a pleasure that didn't reach the depths, but at least the grin was genuine. "I know I can."

*****

Date nights were canceled for the foreseeable future, under a silent agreement that health and safety were on a much higher priority than eating cheap takeout and making out until someone got uncomfortably hard. Egon wasn't only taking home terabytes of files, but all of the scrap-paper that Finitevus had written the equation bases on, and printouts taken from the Byron libraries.

He wrote notes to himself with green ink and circled recursive figures and worked himself through the night until he passed out at his desk, then dragged himself along to work to greet an equally-tired employer. Lunch hours were spent napping under the desk, not necking.

For the most part, everything had gone on fairly well, and Egon had blown through pages on his end without finding any error (what more could one expect of a super genius of this modern age?), and the only skill the Siphon required was fingers nimbler than Egon's were. The major breakthrough came when Egon returned to his apartment and to the roommate that was supposed to have taken another two days out east with his aunt.

"What are you doing???" 

The russet-furred Echidna dropped the sheets and backed off immediately. "Whoa, man, I didn't know you'd--"

He sat down at his desk and tried to sort through the mess made of things. "Didn't know I'd what? You were the one that was supposed to be out in Denshire for the next week."

Duuin sat back on Egon's bed and sighed heavily. "I got bored. Came back. You're usually at your boyfriend's house anyway, sticking your tongue down his throat n' all..."

Egon ignored the jealous barb from someone who evidently wasn't getting tongue down their throat on a daily basis, and tried to remember which page went where, and why he hadn't bothered to number these.

"That's stuff from your boss, right? It's not your handwriting. It's pretty crazy for what it's talking about, you know. Sort of... I mean, not precisely circular logic, because he never really comes back to the first point, but there's no start or end, just sort of..." He spun his finger for a moment. "Spiraling logic. It's not entirely there, you know?" He sat back smugly and played with one of Egon's stuffed animals.

Egon immediately took the challenge to Finitevus' sanity as a threat, and responded promptly. "He's brilliant, you know. You just don't get the way he thinks."

"Oh gods, he's gotten to your brain too?"

The little one rolled his eyes. "You think from X to Y. Straight line, linear logic. With that, you have to be 100% confident 100% of the time so that somewhere along that line, you hit that target. When you're dealing with a realm of uncertainties, the most efficient way to reach your target accurately and precisely is to work in a circuitous and spiraling route. If your target is dead center here, then you'll always spiral right to there. If your target is more here, or here," he said, making dots in the air with his fingers. "You'll have more of a likelihood of still finding it."

He reclaimed his stuffed animal with a growl and locked his roommate out firmly before returning to his desk. It was all woefully out of order, and he dreaded having to tell Finitevus that he'd had a setback because someone changed the order of a stack of papers, when he actually managed to glance at the stack in his hand. These were the Byron-lab notes. Following a simple formula that explored a spiraling logic to come to a destination that, in principle, would have gently bled-off the energies. Finitevus never finished that part.

He pulled out his pen and a new pad of paper and carefully copied out a new hybrid form of the notations. Finitevus' safety was his highest priority. His life was his highest priority. He couldn't let him down, wouldn't let him die. It had to work.

*****

"I'm so glad we can go forward with this," Finitevus hummed while Dr. Sellers made his toast, and everyone else laughed at them. "Another week of this, and who knows if we'd be able to so much as raise our heads from the pillow."

Egon's smile was wobbly as he sipped at his champagne, the taste turning acrid in his mouth before he could swallow. "I... I still don't know if the corrections were..."

"Egon." Finitevus stuffed a mini-quiche in his mouth so he couldn't continue. "Egon, you need to learn to trust yourself the way that I trust you. Don't look so miserable! The Siphon is packed, the equation for reactivity is completed to my satisfactions, and the Council has promised a quick resolution and... and significant reparations to all parties involved. You know how I got my doctorate degree?"

Egon nodded mutely.

"It's altogether possible that once this is over, you might be having an early graduation. Buck up, lad. Enjoy our party." He snagged another tiny quiche to replace the one he'd used as a gag, and took a delicate bite out of it.

"I wish you were taking me on this mission," Egon sighed.

"Absolutely not. It's too dangerous," Finitevus shot the idea down immediately, frowning into his quiche.

"Which is why you need me! The security detail she assigned you don't know how to run your machinery as well as I do! There's no way you had time to train them like you trained me."

Finitevus gave him a awkward smile, swallowing the last of the quiche. "There will be a few hours before I'd have to do anything. I need you here to prime my work and keep everything sorted for my return."

Egon clasped his hand and kept him from running off. "Your work doesn't need to be primed. Everything's either in your brain or on my data pad. Don't make excuses for me."

"Egoooon..." He took a tone of gentle adult exasperation, but the look he received was painful.

"I need to be there, Sir. I... I can't stand not knowing... I couldn't bear it if anything happened, and I wasn't there, and it was because someone else--" He kept his voice down, tried not to shudder, fully aware that anyone could watch this little office-drama, and because of this, Finitevus didn't kiss him.  
"I can't be responsible for my boyfriend's death because I--- I need to be there. Please."

The doctor sighed and deflated. "I'm going to regret this. I... I'll need security clearances for you, and a rad-suit of your own, and--"

Egon kissed him. And in the background, outside of their distressed little bubble, a few coworkers applauded and gave wolf-whistles.

*****

"It's comfortable?" He adjusted the straps on the gloves and leaned back for a moment. "Flex your fingers. I need to see full articulation." Finitevus rolled his eyes, but complied, and Egon moved in to secure the rest of him, hiding every hint of red fur, and making sure that there was nothing loose. Several layers ranging from the texture of canvas, to plastic bag, to bullet-proof vesting concealed him and protected him from the potential radiation damage.

"Bit warm," Finitevus laughed, and propped his face shielding up so he could take a dreg from the icy water bottles that Egon had packed in the cooler. "One of the few sunny days, and it's when I'm wearing enough to go into combat with."

"I want to test the responses one last time, okay?" Egon plugged cables into discrete fixtures and ran diagnostics on the suit, both checking to see if everything was running optimally, and to see if it could take basic hits. Everything dispersed marvelously.

"The electricity tickles," the doctor remarked, and then allowed Egon to sweep his quills back with his own hair-tie. It was the second time he'd seen him with his quills down, and he took a moment to appreciate the sight before Egon was back behind the control booth. "A good luck charm," he called out, and the doctor believed him.

It was an impressive sight that winded both of them when Knuckles appeared in all of his nigh-feral glory, and it took half a second for Finitevus to even prepare the Siphon, so overtaken was he with the image, and probably not just the glow, but the appreciable body that had been on those holoscreens for weeks. Egon was actually jealous, but he tapped his mic twice. "Ready, Doctor? I'm activating the Siphon."

There was a pained, wordless cry over the sound of the crackle and hum of the energy and the machine, and Egon prayed, prayed hard, that it wasn't Finitevus. It seemed the longer it was going on, the more aggressive the Guardian looked. "Be careful."

Faint breathing on the other end of the line, then, "Doesn't hurt as much as I thought... kind of..." A shrieking noise informed him that the microphone on the other end of the line had just melted. He tried to reconcile that to what he'd read, and nearly missed the snarl as the Guardian decided that he was no longer going to just stand and take it.

The green was flickering, fierce and bright like a flame, and Egon urged Finitevus to stand his ground even as the Guardian approached. He only made four steps before sinking to his knees, and then to the ground.

Egon frowned, and thumbed the button again, powering the Siphon down. The bright green faded from him, slowly, leaving a dull red and the marks of wounds blossoming on his body. Finitevus stood over the fallen form, head cocked curiously. "Sir?"

The crackling noise reached him through the barrier of the booth, and Finitevus turned to them, revealing shredded sections of the front of his uniform. There was a painful white glow that was made even more obvious by the charred surroundings of the wrecked Siphon, and Egon dropped his microphone.

"We have a Code Red," Captain Laytu barked. "I repeat, Code Red. Op-failure!" The military men around looked stunned, before reaching for and readying their weapons.

Finitevus appeared to be struggling with his helmet and visor, motility dampened by the thick gloves and the resistance of the fabric, but he finally tugged it off. "Egon? Egon, what's wrong?"

"Sir-- Oh, gods above, Finitevus!" His assistant stumbled out toward that last twenty feet, arms open for him.

Everything after that seemed to happen in slow motion.

"Open fire!" Bright blue beams of light streaked from the energy weapons, potentially at high enough power to at least cause some damage.

Finitevus blinked, turning to Egon, and then ducked to the ground, using his arms to shield him. "What's going on? What's happening?? I don't--" He looked up to the plasma bursts suspended in front of him. "Egon, what--"

His assistant wasn't as lucky, and he watched him take the hit, tumbling and crushing to the gravel. He wanted to cry out his name, but his mouth seemed torn between saying 'Edmund', or 'Egon', and there was some spark of pain that suddenly overtook his chest. His loose dreadlocks partially concealed a spreading red stain that overtook the back of his vest, but they failed to hide the pooling blood beneath him.

He reached for him, ignoring the firefight directed at his person, and turned him over. There was a faint tremble in those thin limbs, and Egon was more interested in shallowly gasping for breath, increasingly pale as his lifeblood leeched out of him. The wound went... through him. "F....Fin..."

He couldn't think any more, consumed with a pain that took him from tip to toe; dimly, he was aware that something was holding Egon up in midair, forcing the blood back within him, sealing those wounds to agonized cries. It might not be enough, but he refused to abandon what little hope that he had.

"We have a confirm." Black-uniformed troops were filing in and leveling their weapons at them-- at Egon and at him, and he didn't know how everything had gone so wrong. At least he was assured that the Guardian was still alive, although he didn't know how long he'd still be at the rate things were going. "Bring them down while he's still raw."

The invisible wall was almost totally blue from their rounds, and he wasn't sure of what more he could do outside of holding his rapidly fading partner, and trying to manage this fierce, all-consuming anger that was rising up inside of them. How... how dare they.... 

Something within him quietly whispered that he had the power to change things, but it was largely ignored in favour of the swelling emotions that overpowered all other logic or rationale. Dead. Edmund-Egon dead gone lost forever killed at their hands everything he'd loved and wanted DEAD DEAD DEAD HIS FAULT THEIR FAULT DEAD--

"RRRRAAAGHHHH!!!" Everything exploded back around them in a flash so bright that no colour could be differentiated, in a scene that was shockingly familiar to one they'd seen before, if he could stop a moment to remember it. Trees were knocked down by the now-limp bodies of the men who'd crashed into them. The ground was smooth and scooped down into a small crater, at the epicenter of which he now stood, cradling his fallen lover.

He was distracted by the digging of tiny fingers into his shoulders, and the warm press of fresh blood into his mostly-ruined uniform. "Finitevus! Fini, you have to go!" He coughed hoarsely and beaded the canvas-front with more too-bright blood. Arterial. "They're going to kill you."

Finitevus didn't point out the obvious, but clutched him tighter and pressed a hand to his back, trying to think happy healing thoughts. "I'm not leaving without you." He had a fairly murderous aura, and he scanned the area for further treacheries.

Egon rested his head against his shoulder heavily and stared up at him. "I... I can take it. The travel. Please, Fini... Get us out of here..." The warmth on his shoulder wasn't blood, but tears, and his little one was being so brave, and wasn't complaining, and it was just enough to jar him from his black reverie.

"...I'll make this better," he promised. "I'll fix everything. Just don't close your eyes. Stay with me, and I'll never leave you..." There was no response, but he was certain that they still had time. With a flicker of bright white light, they were gone. It was, however, the very beginning of their problems....


End file.
